* Telephone auto-reply scripts were proposed. Kamil send one that replies with a "not available" SMS when one [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/034327.html flips the FreeRunner] face down. Alex showcased a project for a full [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-discOctober/034409.html phone firewall] stack, with GUI.

* Telephone auto-reply scripts were proposed. Kamil send one that replies with a "not available" SMS when one [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/034327.html flips the FreeRunner] face down. Alex showcased a project for a full [http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-discOctober/034409.html phone firewall] stack, with GUI.

Revision as of 11:58, 3 November 2008

Hello,

welcome to the unofficial Openmoko Community newsletter, October 20th to November 2nd issue. Today's headline is: Android is definitely coming to the Neo FreeRunner. Many talented hackers have been working at it quietly this year, and Koolu targets a release this November. We have more news from the distributions, with Qt and FDOM updates, and the testing branch dealing with E repackaging. The number of applications and utilities is growing, a Doom port is just out! System-wise, memory timings and bootscripts received impressive optimizations, and the "echo bug" and "touchscreen jitter bug" were patched.

Contents

Images

Yes, Android is coming to the FreeRunner. Shortly after Open Handset Alliance announced the launch of Android Open Source Project, Koolu announced that its Beta port of Android for Freerunner would be available to download in November 2008. Brian Code is working on it, but he is not alone, Sean McNeil is there too. I expect that Neo will have mechanical legs before Christmas.

FDOM: David et al. released again, announcing that development moved to a new home. Mirrors added, more needed. FDOM now exists as an installer script: the FDOMizer. It is meant to be run over an ASU 2008.x image or over an existing FDOM installation. In my experience, this script worked rather well, considering it is a first release.

October 2008 has come and gone, so I guess that we should start forgetting about 2008.10 and start expecting 2008.11. The showstoppers buglist is online and weekly testing reports are available.

The testing image: There has been big changes in E's foundation libraries upstream, so lots of breakage in Testing as E and illume are being repackaged. Breakage as in "The icons, they are all gone ?" That is what testing is for, so people got up to work and it was fixed in a few days, see this thread for details about the transition to the new packaging scheme.

Om2007.2 is not supported anymore. Most bugs in the Trac related to that distro have been closed with status "community". Here is to you, SHR.

Telephone auto-reply scripts were proposed. Kamil send one that replies with a "not available" SMS when one flips the FreeRunner face down. Alex showcased a project for a full phone firewall stack, with GUI.

On the same thread, Mickey reminded about the power of oeventsd 's rules file. This is a user-tweakable rules engine using yaml-syntax to configure system-wide behaviour on DBus events (what a mouthful !). It was introduced in FSO Milestones 3 and needs user feedback, and more documentation I guess.

The Tsing Hua OpenLab held a workshop on 10/29, following the three GSoC interns at OpenMoko Inc.

The Erlang wiki page deserves a special mention in this newsletter for a few reasons. First, it received some TLC this week and is now one of the best articles in our wiki. Second, Erlang is based on concurrent functional programming, an interesting paradigm that needs more advertising. Third, it's nice to think that around the FreeRunner's cradle, there is not only Nokia, Swisscom and Google's electromechanical avatar, but also a sign of Ericsson research. Fourth, Erlang rocks for reliable soft real-time distributed telecoms applications and this is where the future is - see what Dash made of the Neo 1973 platform.

System-level improvements

John Lee's team official bureaucratic name is 'optimization' team, but he prefers Keroro. Here is its status update for first week. They already have impressive boot time improvements (static /dev is a big gain, see Chia-I Wu's experimental fastboot images that get into Illume in about 50 seconds.). They are working on ticket 2071, python loader speed and resume visual feedback. John gave the trac a good lookover and closed more tickets than I can count.

Harald looked at optimizing the NAND memory speed timings on the GTA02: Some initial experiments show that the performance can be easily improved by 41%. However, the actual speed (6.59MBytes/sec) is still much lower than the theoretical maximum read performance of 15.64MBytes/sec. It seems there is more room for improvement inside the MTD layer of the Linux kernel.

Views

Personal tools

welcome to the unofficial Openmoko Community newsletter, October 20th to November 2nd issue. Today's headline is: Android is definitely coming to the Neo FreeRunner. Many talented hackers have been working at it quietly this year, and Koolu targets a release this November. We have more news from the distributions, with Qt and FDOM updates, and the testing branch dealing with E repackaging. The number of applications and utilities is growing, a Doom port is just out! System-wise, memory timings and bootscripts received impressive optimizations, and the "echo bug" and "touchscreen jitter bug" were patched.

Images

Yes, Android is coming to the FreeRunner. Shortly after Open Handset Alliance announced the launch of Android Open Source Project, Koolu announced that its Beta port of Android for Freerunner would be available to download in November 2008. Brian Code is working on it, but he is not alone, Sean McNeil is there too. I expect that Neo will have mechanical legs before Christmas.

FDOM: David et al. released again, announcing that development moved to a new home. Mirrors added, more needed. FDOM now exists as an installer script: the FDOMizer. It is meant to be run over an ASU 2008.x image or over an existing FDOM installation. In my experience, this script worked rather well, considering it is a first release.

October 2008 has come and gone, so I guess that we should start forgetting about 2008.10 and start expecting 2008.11. The showstoppers buglist is online and weekly testing reports are available.

The testing image: There has been big changes in E's foundation libraries upstream, so lots of breakage in Testing as E and illume are being repackaged. Breakage as in "The icons, they are all gone ?" That is what testing is for, so people got up to work and it was fixed in a few days, see this thread for details about the transition to the new packaging scheme.

Om2007.2 is not supported anymore. Most bugs in the Trac related to that distro have been closed with status "community". Here is to you, SHR.

Telephone auto-reply scripts were proposed. Kamil send one that replies with a "not available" SMS when one flips the FreeRunner face down. Alex showcased a project for a full phone firewall stack, with GUI.

On the same thread, Mickey reminded about the power of oeventsd 's rules file. This is a user-tweakable rules engine using yaml-syntax to configure system-wide behaviour on DBus events (what a mouthful !). It was introduced in FSO Milestones 3 and needs user feedback, and more documentation I guess.

The Tsing Hua OpenLab held a workshop on 10/29, following the three GSoC interns at OpenMoko Inc.

The Erlang wiki page deserves a special mention in this newsletter for a few reasons. First, it received some TLC this week and is now one of the best articles in our wiki. Second, Erlang is based on concurrent functional programming, an interesting paradigm that needs more advertising. Third, it's nice to think that around the FreeRunner's cradle, there is not only Nokia, Swisscom and Google's electromechanical avatar, but also a sign of Ericsson research. Fourth, Erlang rocks for reliable soft real-time distributed telecoms applications and this is where the future is - see what Dash made of the Neo 1973 platform.

System-level improvements

John Lee's team official bureaucratic name is 'optimization' team, but he prefers Keroro. Here is its status update for first week. They already have impressive boot time improvements (static /dev is a big gain, see Chia-I Wu's experimental fastboot images that get into Illume in about 50 seconds.). They are working on ticket 2071, python loader speed and resume visual feedback. John gave the trac a good lookover and closed more tickets than I can count.

Harald looked at optimizing the NAND memory speed timings on the GTA02: Some initial experiments show that the performance can be easily improved by 41%. However, the actual speed (6.59MBytes/sec) is still much lower than the theoretical maximum read performance of 15.64MBytes/sec. It seems there is more room for improvement inside the MTD layer of the Linux kernel.